October 7, 2008
Useful new testimony out from Peter Orzag at the CBO on pension plan losses in the U.S. over the last year or so. At $2-trillion the headline number is huge, but you need to keep it in perspective. But that...
The obligatory tag cloud of Ben Bernanke's NABE speech today. Gosh, other than using scary words like liquidity, funding, Congress, developments, risks, stability, lending, rates and that sort of thing, I can't see why the market took it so badly....
Whatever your feelings on Jim Cramer, or Stephen Colbert for that matter, this segment from last night's Colbert Report is funny....
I know it's way too early to really start picking winners and losers in the current credit carnage, but let's at least start thinking about it. After all, one day this war will end. One quick candidate: CME. We are...
Blackly amusing tidbit from a Bloomberg piece about credit troubles at U.K. football clubs: The English Premier League has become a scoreboard for the global credit crisis. Newcastle players wear the logo of Northern Rock Plc, a U.K. mortgage-lender...
Some quick links to other items of interest: Excellent new IMF report on global financial (in)stability (IMF) ETFs Grab More Market Share, Reach 35% (IndexUniverse) AIG testimony documents from House Oversight Committee (House) Wall Street's meltdown is good for non-financial...
Shocks in developed economies are causing massive capital outflows in emerging economies. The point is driven home nicely by the following figure:...
If nothing else, the current credit crisis is giving researchers and analysts an opportunity to try out all sorts of new ways of visualizing truly unusual data. Case in point, the following heat map showing how the crisis has over...
A scan of some key headlines from Iceland over the last two years. People didn't notice, but in many ways credit crisis really started there -- with many of the same characters, like Moody's -- not with Bear Stearns and...
In one of the more remarkable moves in the current credit crisis, the Fed has announced it will start directly purchasing commercial paper: The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday announced the creation of the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF), a...
I'm not sure which part of an absurd interview with writer Tom Wolfe to point to -- there are many idiocies to choose among -- but I'll just point to this one and go with it: The whole thing, starting...
Some quick links to items of interest: The CBOE set a volume record on option trading in September (CBOE) Best year ever for options traders (Bloomberg) List of the 31 (!) stocks with >$1b market cap and share price >$5...
